Planning an Ads campaign on 10 steps

The process of planning and doing advertising is not as easy as it might seem. But it can give you better results than you expect.

1. Improve your web

This is the most important step of all. Any effort you make to be recognized, to position yourself, to maintain or refresh your image in the digital space is directed towards your website. That is your space, the place where you connect with your customers or followers of your brand.

So, it is imperative to work and improve constantly your website. Share interesting content, maintain an attractive graphics line, incorporate original and interesting videos and images, optimize it with SEO techniques, and of course, take advantage of ads campaign to convert and build loyalty to more people, with a good place of destination, your website.

This is the first step and we dare to say that it is prior to any step before starting an ads campaign.

Your social media accounts too…

It is not enough to improve your website. The Internet is an ecosystem and every platform you’ve got there is related. So, if you work enough on your website but you forget to improve your social media accounts, the work you wouldn’t be doing it all.

So, use the same graphics line, make a plan where the content that you share on your website is related to all posts in your social media profile. Build a solid image, keep your audience entertained or informed, maintain a good internet presence, and enjoy the results on your own skin. Then, share it with us.

The world of ads is very extensive and it is important to warn you, So, there are platforms and kind of ads that are not directly linked to websites or social media accounts, they have different destinations. But these cases are really specific and they are not common for all industries. That is why we are not going to talk about them in this post.

2. Set your goals

If a marketing campaign or any other campaign does not have clear objectives to reach and being effective it will be very difficult to measure if we are doing it right or it is working.

Before making an effort or making a decision you must know and make clear what you want to achieve with the campaign.

An ads campaign is not the exception. If you have clear what you want, and this can be the recognition of your brand or awareness, promote and offer, generate sales leads, positioning on the market, refreshment or getting customer loyalty. All of these are possible goals for your brand that you would achieve through an ads campaign.

Clarify them and think in the best actions or strategies that you have to do for achieving all the goals.

Some of these strategies are about the content, the kind of resources you will use (videos, flyers) the calendar of the publications, maybe a tool that you would use, etc.

Tips based on how we do it:

We have different campaigns in the Business, the main ones are planned for Lead Generation, this is always ongoing campaigns, and we eventually do campaigns to promote events.

Ad platforms like Facebook Business Manager and Google Ads provide specific customizations that help you in each of the cases.

3. Select and set the KPIs you will use

When you start an ads campaign with some specific goals you also have to think in the KPIs that you will use to measure the progress towards your goals inside of this marketing channel.

If you do not know KPIs, this is certain numerical marketing metrics that you can use to measure the advance and the performance of your marketing strategies and campaigns. In this specific case, your ads campaign.

There are many many possible KPIs that you can choose to do this task, but here, we will show you the most common of them. Especially for social media account and websites.

This is the list:

ROI. This information is vital for any startup, company or business in the world. ROI means the return of investment. If you start a campaign or just a business you have to invest money, effort, and many things. And all of these things have a value, an amount, a predetermined value in money that you know. Like every entrepreneur, you hope to get it back and from there you will begin to make a profit. When you get back all the investment you made before, we are in the presence of the return of investment.
In this opportunity, you will have the return of investment when you recover all the money invested in your ads campaign.

The equation, in this case, would be (Revenue - Cost of goods sold) / Cost of goods sold.

Organic Traffic is all people who access your web through the results on search engines, we mean (SERP). This traffic is related to SEO techniques.

Social Media Traffic (and Conversion Rates). As its name said, this is the reach and all clients converted after seeing the ad. This information you can get it from the platform that you use to publish your ads. For example, if you make a Facebook ad campaign, and you use Power Editor for transmitting it, the same tool gives you this information. So, see it and improve what is necessary.

Sales Revenue that is how much profit you have won thank to your investment in ads. This is really important because it helps you to measure your efficiency and effectiveness. The calculation is the next: Total sales for the year - Total revenue from customers acquired through ads campaign.

Cost per Acquisition (CPA): this is a metric where is measured the aggregate cost of acquiring one customer on a campaign or a channel level. You can track this metric making many things as exporting PPC campaign data from AdWords, also, using promotional codes and building custom links for internal campaigns, and including a form field on lead forms that ask customers how they found out about a campaign.

Cost per Click (CPC): every time a person clicks on your ad you must pay to the Ad platform that you are using. This is what this metric is about, which mainly serves to have a balance between the cost you have to pay for each click and the profit or pay per click you are getting. The latter must always be higher.

Cost Per Impression (CPI): This is the cost that you pay for each potential customer who views the ad and for every thousand potential customers who view your advertisement. This metric is used for evaluating the profitability of your ads campaign.

Shares, reactions, comments, likes, and every fact that proves the engagement

Tips based on how we do it:

Depending on the platform that you use all this KPIs can be provided. For example, If you connect your Google Ads Campaign with your Google Analytics account for your website, they provide most of these metrics. The same with Facebook Business Manager.

Some other scenarios where you will have to calculate this manually are for example A) If you pay an Influencer to drive traffic, or if you do an event offline.

This is simple. Based on your marketing plan, you should know which platform is better to transmit your ads campaign.

If you do not know it, take in consideration which platform is most used by the people who are your target audience, think in which is your stronghold and publish it there.

In this same point, you have to know through which platform you’re going to make the publications. For example, if you are going to make your campaign on Instagram, you can do it from the same platform or using another platform that permits you to make a campaign there, as Power Editor.

Why do we show you these alternatives? Well, in some cases some of these platforms have benefits or advantages in front of the same destination platform. In this specific case of Instagram, we think that the segmentation for Instagram ads campaign in Power Editor is better, more complete and specific than the segmentation in the same platform, so you would be more effective with the result if you use Power Editor.

The most important point of this step is that you recognize all the platforms you need to concretize your ads campaign.

Tips based on how we do it:

Nowadays there are many platforms to use: Twitter, Google, Linkedin, Facebook, Instagram, Quora, Reddit, Yelp, Youtube, etc For small business is very difficult to divide a small budget into many platforms because it would become ineffective. What we did was select 3 different platforms and start running experiments.

We started with Yelp, Linkedin and Google. At that point, Yelp and Linkedin were very expensive and were not driving traffic to the site, so we decided to move the budget completely to Google Ads.

5. Segment your target audience

This you can do it at the moment you are structuring and making the ad or the group of ads on the platform that you choose. But we recommend that you do it better before this point, so you can develop a message and clear and well-targeted ads.

Tips based on how we do it:

The tools that you use to deploy your ads also help you optimize this information. Keep in consideration demographics and preferences and interest data provided by the tools to enhance your segments.

6. Work on the publication

At this point, you have all the information needed to elaborate your post or the content you are going to use for your ads campaign. The audience, the keyword, etc.

It could be an image, a video, a blog’s post, etc. The truth is that you have to prepare good content for the campaign. Eye-catching, interesting, and clearly a message that you identify with and that your audience can also identify with.

If it is a campaign you can use only one publication for a period of time or a group of publications too.

Tips on how we do it:

We usually design arts and images specifically to the goal. Messages like: CONTACT US, CALL US, CLICK HERE are important to be clear

We have also create explanatory videos for this purpose.

7. Structure of the announcement

This is simple. Put the content, write the copy or the caption, choose the exposure period of the advertisement, make the segmentation, put the amount of money that you will invest, and follow every step that the platform gives you to elaborate the campaign. Of course, using the information that you managed before. And at the end, launching it.

Don’t forget to the several variations, and measure which one is more effective.

8. Measures results

When the campaign is finished you will have numbers. These numbers will show you the views, the scope, the interactions with your publications, and information that you will use before.

It is important that you analyze these results for improving your future ads.

Also, you can compare sales before, during and after your advertising campaign and measure all the benefits that you received thanks to your campaign.

The effectiveness is the best way to get better your content strategy, to know all you can get in the medium and long term if you continue to use ads campaigns, or at least to make an estimate of this.

You would use this information in the next step.

Tips on how we do it:

We use the information of conversion on Google Ads and Facebook Business Manager to improve the audiences or Segments that we are targeting, many times these tools need a process of optimization before delivering good results.

9. Optimize your campaign

The optimization of the campaign is one of the most important tasks. This means that you analyze the results (KPIs, reach, views) for being able to change the budget allocation, the content, and everything that you consider works better than another.

That is one of the importance of measuring the results. To give strength to the one that works the most, and to improve that which was not as effective as you expected.

This is what we call optimizing a campaign and it is really good if you plan to make campaigns for a long time. This will make you more effective and efficient.

These are all steps for making an ads campaign in general terms. In later posts we will explain better each step, we will learn how to do it for different platforms, how to optimize your campaign, and useful information that will help your brand a lot. This is the marketing month. You are welcome!